Although most WD drives have similar names and look the same, they are quite different on the inside. Almost all models (200BB, 400BB, 600BB, 800BB, 1000BB) represent different generations of drive models and therefore have different performance specifications. The 100 GB drive is of course the most advanced model.
The technical data of the WD1000BB is very similar to other 7,200 rpm drives, as you can see in the table below: It has an average seek time of less than 10 ms, a 2 MB buffer and an UltraATA/100 interface.
Still I wonder if it could be the time to increase the size of the cache memory, as it has not grown in the same relation than the drive capacity. Looking at memory prices, it would not cost very much to go to 8 or even 16 MB of cache memory; most likely this could help to maximize performance or at least to keep it on the highest level possible.
|Western Digital WD1000BB|
|Capacity||100 GB (3 Platters)|
|Rotation Speed||7,200 rpm|
|Average Seek Time||8.9 ms|
|Cache Memory||2048 kB|
|CPU||Intel Celeron, 500 MHz|
|Motherboard||Asus CUSL2, i815 Chipset|
|RAM||128 MB SDRAM, 7ns (Crucial/Micron ) CL2|
|IDE Controller||i815 UltraDMA/100 Controller (ICH2)|
|Graphics Card||i815 On-Board Graphics|
|Network||3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit|
|Operating Systems||Windows 2000 Pro 5.00.2195 SP1|
|Benchmarks and Measurements|
|Office Applications Benchmark||ZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk Winmark 1.2|
|Highend Applications Benchmark||ZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 1.2|
|Low Level Benchmarks||HD Tach 2.61|
|Performance Tests||HD Tach 2.61|
|Graphics Drivers||Intel i815 Reference Drivers 4.3|
|IDE-Drivers||Intel Bus Master DMA Drivers 6.03|
|Screen Resolution||1024x768, 16 Bit, 85 Hz Refresh|